Du Cane Gap and the passage to Narnia

03Sep

Du Cane Gap and the passage to Narnia

by Simon Cubit

In the much loved CS Lewis book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,
four children travel through a wardrobe to the land of Narnia. Du Cane
Gap, a low pass just north of Lake St Clair, acted as a topographical
wardrobe for a number of early hunters giving them access to a somewhat
magical land far beyond their normal territories. Today, one might
argue that the Gap continues that role as a key section of the Overland
Track.

The story begins in 1910. In November
of that year Liena hunter, Paddy Hartnett, and his friend, Ted Clarke,
decided to go prospecting at Lake St Clair. Neither had been there
before and each had only a vague idea where it was. Nonetheless, they
followed the Mersey up beyond Hartnett’s hunting run at Kia Ora Creek
before climbing up out of the valley and headed in a south easterly
direction across the subalpine Mountains of Jupiter before dropping down
into the Narcissus Valley just north of Lake St Clair. They prospected
around the lake in a clockwise direction and, a week later, found
themselves back in the Narcissus Valley near to the point where they had
previously arrived. But rather than climb back up the valley wall, they
continued on up the valley where they saw a low pass on their right.
They climbed through it finding that it provided relatively easy access
down to the Mersey Valley on the other side.

Hartnett immediately understood its strategic significance. He had recognised
the tourism potential of Lake St Clair and saw that the pass gave him
the opportunity to easily transport visitors from the Mersey Valley into
the Narcissus and down to the lake. Within a year he created a
packhorse track from his Kia Ora camp, up through the pass, and down
into the Narcissus Valley. He also built a highland lodge (Du Cane Hut)
at the foot of Falling Mountain as overnight accommodation for his
guests and, by 1913, ran his first trip leading guests from Liena to the lake.

The Narcissus valley was also very rich
hunting country. By 1912 Hartnett began hunting from a hut and skin
shed he built half way down the valley. This was a hugely significant
act in a geo-political sense. In the great land rush that took place
around the First World War when men staked out winter hunting runs, it
served to claim the Narcissus for the northern communities of Mole Creek
and Sheffield instead of for the Derwent Bridge community which might
legitimately have seen it as being part of its territory.

The extent to which passage through Du
Cane Gap represented a journey through the wardrobe into Narnia, can be
demonstrated by Bert Nichols’s experiences. When Hartnett abandoned the
Upper Mersey to chase osmiridium at Adamsfield in 1925, Lorinna hunter,
Bert Nichols, took over his Narcissus run and built a hut of his own
just north of Lake St Clair. He had a bumper season in 1925 catching
skins that were auctioned in the Sheffield Hotel for £500. But well he
earnt it! His Lake St Clair hunting run was 80 kilometres, as the crow
flies, from Sheffield and, as he told those at the hotel, he spent 32
days out of the three-month hunting season simply carrying his skins
out!

The bounty of the
Narcissus, however, did not last long. In 1927, the Narcissus
Valley and a broad strip of land around Lake St Clair, already a scenery
reserve, was declared a wildlife sanctuary. The declaration presented
real issues to Nichols forcing him further south to the Cheyne Range, Mt Hugel and the Navarre
Plains. The boundary of the reserve, however, was not marked. Nor were
there maps hunters might use to orient themselves. Many, accidentally or
otherwise, wandered across the line. Occasionally, they were caught.
Nichols and his brother Ernest were hunting in the Cuvier Valley in August 1927. The police appeared and caught Ernest who was subsequently hauled up before a magistrate and fined.

During the Great Depression when money
was very tight, the idea that somehow there was a different world beyond
Du Cane Gap continued to play out in the minds of hunters. In 1933
three Deloraine men: John Creely and Keith Sinfield of Western Creek and
Frank Youd of the Needles, were also caught hunting in the Cuvier
Valley. Despite their pleas that they were unaware they were in the
Reserve, these men were each fined £50 or given three months gaol as an
alternative. Without any money, they had no option but to serve time.

The very real risk of getting caught by
the police encouraged Nichols to try his hand at guiding as Hartnett
had done. There was a growing demand from city people wishing to walk
from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair or vice versa. At that time there
was no track linking the two places with the ‘Overland Track’ being
merely a concept tossed around by national park managers. Experienced
walkers could generally make it from Cradle Mountain to Pelion Plains
but typically became slewed beyond the point. Nichols, of course, knew
the way and from 1927 began an active guiding career. He guided groups
along the hunting tracks he and Harnett had made and accommodated them
overnight in various huts along the way including a number he had built.
He took all his groups, whether travelling northward or southward
through Du Cane Gap.

In 1931 national
park authorities, seeking a time when guides might be unnecessary,
offered to pay Nichols to physically mark the track he took from Cradle
Valley to Lake St Clair. Recognizing this as a strategy whose ultimate
objective was to put him out of business, Nichols accepted their money
but only did a cursory job marking the track. Experienced city walkers
who attempted to follow his route still became lost. Meanwhile, Nichols
kept guiding. Four years later, the authorities returned with a
substantial offer. In 1935 the Scenery Preservation Board decided to
spend £200
formally creating the Overland Track. Lionel Connell of Waldheim was
awarded the contract to cut the northern section from Cradle Mountain to
Pelion Gap
with Nichols contracted to cut the section from the Gap to Lake St
Clair. Nichols was required to slash scrub, cut footholds in logs, place
a stake every three chains, and make good crossings over the difficult
Kia Ora Creek and the Narcissus River. He was also asked to add an
additional room to Du Cane Hut and to his own hut at Nichols Junction.

These substantial works allowed walkers
to traverse the Overland Track without guides and thus marked the end
of Nichol’s guiding career. Du Cane Gap, like the wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,
once admitted only a few into the magical land of the Narcissus. But
with the establishment of the Overland Track it became a significant
thoroughfare. The influence of the hunters, though, remained with the
location of the Overland Track from Pelion Plains to Lake St Clair
following Hartnett’s and Nichol’s hunting tracks.

Addenda: The new 1900 bridge over the Arm River

In a previous blog (16 May 2014) I
wrote about a re-routing of the Howells Plains stock route at Arm River
that took place around 1900. The original route did a great loop up into
the middle reaches of the Arm Valley to a ford before returning down
along the southern bank of the Arm to a point at the toe of
Maggs Mountain where it turned to follow up the western bank
of the Mersey. This was a poor route subject to flooding requiring
stockyards to be maintained to hold cattle until river levels dropped.
Then, around 1900, a new route was found that led to the construction of
a high level bridge and some significant excavations. This new
route, which crossed the Arm River near the Forestry Tasmania camp, was a
dramatic improvement that, among other things, allowed wheeled vehicles
to be taken into the Upper Mersey.

This was a major
project. It involved lots of surveying, track location, bridge building
and earthworks. I imagined there would be lots of documentation about
this large undertaking but search as I may for years I could find
nothing. Who did the work? Who funded it?

Then, in recent times, a bit of
information came to me that goes some way in explaining what happened.
The late Lewis Lee wrote some notes before he died a copy of which
recently came to me. In those notes was a paragraph:

‘In those
days, after selecting blocks, for few years you were allowed some money
called “Waste Land Money”. My father and Mr. Field had this money
spent on [the] road this side of Howells, to allow bullock dray to get
right in to Howells. We could send our provisions in on the dray.
This dray was built a foot wider than was usual, so it would not capsize
in rough places. It and bullocks were kept at Howells.’

I believe that the work ‘on the road
this side of Howells’ Lewis describes was the rerouting of the
stockroute at Arm River. George Lee (of Lees Paddocks) and Richard Field
(of Howells Plains) were the two major landowners who had to submit to
the flood prone crossing of the Arm on a regular basis. They pooled
their resources to create a new route that was not only flood proof but
allowed wheeled vehicles such as bullock drays into Howells for the
first time.